“My son!”
The kneeling figure started slightly, hearing the whisper in its ear,
and half turned its face.
“_Domine salvum fac Regem nostrum Ricardum_, my son.”
The Benedictine had stolen list-footed from among the shadows of the
great pillars, and stood, a blacker shadow, bending over the solitary
worshipper in the darkening chapel of St. John. It was a breathless
August evening of the year 1483, and not a sound penetrated to this
remote fastness of the Keep.
“God save the King, Father!” answered the suppliant. It was
Brackenbury himself, Lieutenant of the Tower, and a sore matter of
conscience had brought him to this place. He rose instantly to his
feet.
“I say it with all my heart,” quoth he. “God save the King--from
numbering himself among his worst enemies.”
“Sh--sh!” whispered the chaplain. “Sh--sh! good Sir John.” He put a
finger to his lips, and, motioning the other forth, held him on the
outer threshold.
“To ensure the pure succession,” he said low. “This bastard boy, Sir
John--a canker that would eat into the State. No safety but in his
excision.”
“For the second time,” replied the knight sternly, “take my answer.
Question, if you will, the blood that courses in his veins; question
not mine. That stoops to no midnight butchery.”
He waved his hand, as if in appeal or protest, towards the chapel, and
turned to go. But the priest detained him.
“A moment, good Sir John. The King wills it.”
“He must find a baser instrument.”
“Well so,” said the Benedictine, “well so, good Sir John. Only keep
your back to us, saving your honour, and see nothing for a little
space.”
The Lieutenant, without another word, strode away, his harness
clanging in the vaults.
The covert priest stood listening, a smile, small and hungry, on his
lips. He hungered, indeed, had always hungered, for many
things--preferment, power, the good immoral gifts of life and
indulgences other than Papal. And suddenly, amazingly, it appeared,
they were all come within his grasp. He had only to persuade this
master of his to a certain deed, by absolving him for it before
committed, and a mitre awaited him. It had been whispered in his ear,
as he had whispered in Sir John’s. The abbot of his own Order at
Westminster was deeply involved with the Queen-Dowager, to whom he had
given sanctuary. The crooked King disliked people who sheltered his
enemies. A motion of his hand and the chaplain was in the abbot’s
place. The seat awaited him--it was stupendous, actual--and, while
reaching for it, to be baulked by a scruple of conscience not his own!
The thing was intolerable.
Abbot of St. Peter’s! His lips watered, thinking of it; his eyelids
blinked and reddened. He was a lean, famished-looking body, with
sharp-set features, and a smile perpetually on his mouth between
propitiatory and craving. One might have counted his ribs, and never
guessed at the dreams of surfeit that wantoned under them. He turned
and crept away.
That night a messenger rode from the Tower, following in the wake of
the royal progress northwards. He found the King where he lay at
Warwick Castle, and, entering to him at midnight, whispered of Sir
John’s obstinate density and of the chaplain’s better understanding. A
few minutes later Sir James Tyrrell, Master of the King’s Horse,
started on his way back to London. He took with him a brace of
confidants, fat trusty fellows, whose names should be pilloried
throughout the ages. They were John Dighton and Miles Forrest, sinewy
miscreants, as callous to suffering as Smithfield butchers. He took
also a royal warrant, entrusting to him, for one night only, the
custody of the fortress, its keys and passwords; and finally he took,
for his personal comfort in the business, a sure conviction of his own
damnation. Reaching the Tower, he displayed his commission, locked
away all troublesome witnesses, emptied the outer ward, to which the
public had access, of its loiterers, and had the place to himself.
Having done which, he hastened with his two ruffians to the gate-house
where the princes lay.
It was a close, windless night, with thunder brooding over the river.
Every stone that slipped under the assassin’s feet jarred his nerves
intolerably. He muttered to himself as he walked, wringing his wet
forehead. The shadow of a figure that rose upon him from the shadowy
porch brought an oath from his lips.
“Who’s that? Answer, and be damned!”
“Hist, good Sir James!” whispered the crawling priest. “Curse not
thine own absolver.”
“A blasphemy,” answered Tyrrell; “or God Himself is a villain. Come,”
he said intolerantly: “show us the way to hell.”
The Benedictine crossed himself.
“_Ostende nobis, Domine, misericordium tuam_,” he murmured. “Direct
our stumbling feet who seek the light by dubious ways. Give me the
key, soldier. It were well that I ascended first to report if the
children sleep. The better for them, the better for us.”
Bending under a low doorway in the wall of the passage, he
disappeared. Tyrrell let out a quaking groan.
“Trip his heels, trip his heels, O, devil my master!” he sighed
between his teeth.
The shadow went up the stairs, paused at a certain door, fitted a key
into its lock with stealthy caution, listened, and glided into the
room beyond. It was small, and fast locked in stone ten feet in
thickness. There were windows front and back. Through the former a
cresset burning on St. Thomas’s Tower across the ward cast a red
flicker upon a couple of pallets standing near side by side against
the wall. A sound of unconscious breathing came from these. The evil
shadow crept on and stooped.
Blood on the young white face! Fool! it was the painting of the
cresset. This deed might seem a pitiful thing were it not for the
hunger that seemed a pitifuller. To be abbot--to be bishop--to be
cardinal even! Who knew? He glanced down. His own inky cassock was
smeared with the scarlet fire. To wade through blood to the Sacred
College! Why not? The end expiated all means thereto. There were a
score of precedents to justify him. The Abbacy once gained, his power
for good would be multiplied a hundredfold. He raised his eyes. The
red glare seemed to fill them from within. Something in his
interposing shadow appeared to make the younger child behind him
uneasy. He stirred and moaned in his sleep. Presently he murmured,
with a whimper:
“Take it away, mother!”
He was always her Saxon darling, with the head of gold. She used to
call his eyes like cockles in the corn. The shadow stole apart, and,
with a sigh, he breathed warm again.
To be abbot! What surer justification of his right than to dispatch
these innocent souls to God? They would thank him in the end for much
peril spared them. He hesitated no longer, but, leaving the door ajar,
descended as he had come.
The human dogs below were straining in their leashes. At a sign
Tyrrell motioned them to their work. The two stole up, while their
master remained to hold the door. And then came the awful interval.
The blood on the white face! The priest blinked at the cresset flaming
high across the yard. Surely it burned with a lurider glow? It was the
wind fanning it. Wind? there was no breath of wind in all the dead
night. What, then, if not the pipe of wind in passage or keyhole, was
that sudden whine which rose upon the silence? With the sweat breaking
out on his forehead, he seized a mattock, one of several which had
been laid ready, and began frenziedly striking at the ground under the
wall. Tyrrell, with a gasping oath, came hurrying to join him.
They dug like madmen, against their own terror and the vision to come.
And when at last it announced itself with heave, and shuffle, and the
grunting of brute lungs, they would not pause for a moment, but,
reinforced, wrought and wrought until the grave was made, and closed
in, and their sin covered. And then Tyrrell, summoning his vile
grooms, delivered up his trust and rode away for York, with his soul
rattling like a dried kernel within him.
The chaplain thought of a prayer for the dead, and bending, with an
abject face, to kneel by the grave, saw dark stains on his sandalled
feet. He glanced at the burning cresset, stooped and, touching them,
looked at his fingers. To wade through blood! With a shudder he thrust
his hands out of sight into the wide sleeves of his cassock, and went
hurriedly away, drifting across the open ward like the black shadow of
a cloud.
But the morning found him restored and unrepentant.
Abbot of St. Peter’s! Day by day, while that preferment was delayed,
the hunger ravened in him and the conscience hardened, until his
crime, going unrewarded, filled him with an insane and rageful joy.
But one evening there came a secret message to him that the King,
superstitious after the fashion of the sceptical and world-serving,
had taken exception to the place of burial, and desired that the dead
should be privately exhumed and reinterred in a place less
unconsecrate. Flushed with renewed hope, then, he hugged his
confidence, and went with burning eyes about his task.
God knows how he managed to perform it, and alone, and without
exciting suspicion. He was lord of his own sacred domain. But, working
with demoniac energy, he got out the spoiled young bodies, and
conveyed them one by one to the new grave he had himself opened for
them under the chapel stairs. There they might repose within sound of
the Mass, at peace and at rest for evermore. His imagination, as with
monomaniacs, could flow only in one direction. Each day he trod upon
the stones that hid his secret, and never faltered or feared. And each
day he waited, hungering, for his summons to Westminster.
It came at last--the prize for which he had wrought, and suffered, and
bartered his priestly soul. He was in the chapel at the time, and he
heard the voice of the Lieutenant calling to him. He hurried out, and
saw Sir John standing, citation in hand, at the foot of the stairs.
“Hail, Father Abbot!” quoth the knight, in that derisory tone he had
ever assumed towards him since their last interview.
The chaplain, his thin lips chewing out a smile, lingered on the top
of the flight. And then, all in a moment, his eyes were seen to fix
themselves in a stare of horror, as if some terrific vision opposed
them.
“What’s this?” he whispered. “Who put it here?”
The other answered, startled: “I see naught.”
“Ah-ha!”
He threw up his hands with a screech and fell headlong. His neck, as
he pitched, doubled under him with a crack, and the body, bowling
down, was flung at Sir John’s feet. There, with its head fallen back
upon the very stone which locked away its secret, it relaxed and
settled.
_He had received the wages and paid the price of blood in one and the
same instant._
So died that chaplain of the Tower who alone, out of all the kingdom,
could have solved the mystery of the tragic dead. When, on the
accession of Henry, it became necessary, for reasons of high policy,
to disinter the bodies, the grave under the wall was found to have
been violated--only rumour could whisper by whom. One of the actual
murderers was dead; the other, together with the late Master of the
Horse, being seized and questioned, could throw no light upon the
matter. Not until two hundred years had passed was the secret to be
unearthed by some masons engaged in repairing the chapel stairs.
And the priest? There was a legend once current of an odd little
detail connected with his end. And that was that the body, when picked
up, exhibited no marks of injury about the head and neck, only the
feet were bloody. It might well have been, seeing whereon they had
trodden those many days past.